Issue 243

You are now a Kenyan refugee in Somalia!” That was the opening statement from Rumano and Lionel, the two French humanitarian workers based in Wajid, when they took me in as their overnight guest.

Have you ever traveled when the best thing would have been to remain at home and go to work? Have you ever traveled when you shouldn’t have after every sign that the trip was jinxed and doomed to fail was there for you to see?

And then you go to great lengths to go on and finally not even get to your destination? My first trip to Somalia proper was exactly like this. In the last three years, I have crisscrossed Somalia proper by air on my way to breakaway Republic of Somaliland. Once or twice we landed at K50, Wajid or in Kismayu just to fuel and pick passengers. We didn’t need to change aircrafts. This time, on my way to President Yusuf Abdillahi’s seat of power that is Baidoa, our UNCAS plane landed at K50, an airstrip 50 km from Mogadishu.

As I was made to know in Nairobi, I would board another UNCAS aircraft but a smaller one this time fondly referred to as the caravan to take me and a few fellow passengers to Baidoa. As we disembarked happily after two and a half hours of flight that looked like eternity, we were promptly informed by our caravan pilot that we could not proceed to Baidoa! A fierce battle between clans was raging in the town. All flights to the town had been cancelled. Information reaching K50 where we were, indicated that casualties had hit the number eight with higher numbers seriously injured. On receiving this news, I felt like I had been hit below the belt. I felt some rare heat at the back of my head that had nothing to do with the weather in Somalia.

I had left Nairobi with the scantiest briefing about traveling in Somalia using UN aircrafts from my sponsors. Beyond going to the UNDP Somalia security office in Westlands, my sponsors never told me that there was a high possibility of failing to find a connecting flight.

More importantly, that in such circumstances, I would be abandoned by the UN crew to fend for myself in the war-torn country! They never warned me to carry cash because I might need it to stay in a hotel in case I got stranded in one of the many airstrips in Southern Somalia. They never even told me I would need $20 for my airport tax at JKIA!

Out of stupidity, I never even bothered to change money at JKIA but in my wisdom, I had carried soap, a face and a bath towel apart from my usual toiletry. What baffled me about these UN flights was the fact that here I was along with other passengers booked for Baidoa. However, on arriving at K50 where we were supposed to change to another UN aircraft, which was there anyway, as soon as it was announced that no planes was allowed to land in Baidoa due to military skirmishes, the crew seemed to wash their hands off us! Why should this breach of international air travel standards be allowed within the UN system?

How can the UN allow one of its operations to subject paying travelers to such hostilities without due care of their accommodation and safety? Isn’t this criminal and a violation of basic human rights?

If I board an aircraft to take me from point A to B, the onus is on the carrier to either get me to my destination or return me to point A where I started the journey. It is equally incumbent upon them to provide me with accommodation and meals until I return to safety. They have no business negotiating with other aid workers to accommodate their abandoned passengers on humanitarian grounds as was the case with me!

That ghastly experience not withstanding, let me resume my tale of trials and tribulations in Southern Somalia. Before I tell you how jinxed this trip was, allow me to inform you that an hour before I started writing this article, our caravan brought us to this town called Wajid, an hour’s flight from K50.

On landing here, a Good Samaritan’s NGO car drove us 1 km from the airstrip to Wajid town proper. For those of you who would like to have a mental picture of Wajid, it is the size of Sagaa trading centre on the way to Nakuru, Sondu or Yala in Nyanza or better still Sagana or Karatina if one were generous with one’s grading.

I was supposed to have traveled the Saturday before with my sponsors. Had I done so, I would probably not have gone through all that I’m describing now. I would be in Baidoa, surrounded by deafening gunshots and equally barricaded by heavily armed UN Special Protection Unit (SPU) police force.

I didn’t travel that Saturday because I had overslept! By the time I was arriving at the airport and frantically hustling with the UN check-in staff, immigration officials and the last security check-point before boarding the plane, my aircraft was long airborne. After a few insults earlier from my sponsor who was incensed that I had missed the flight, with $40 poorer for taking a cab to and from the airport in vain, I went home a very dejected person.

I was dejected because it was the second time I had missed a flight in my whole life. The first time was when my father-in-law had died in a tragic road crash more than a decade earlier. But that is another story for another day. I had put a lot of time and intellectualism into this trip. The lure of going to run a workshop for warlords turned Cabinet Ministers was too tempting to pass me by. I was all set with my training material already shipped to Baidoa over the weekend.

This material morning was the result of near meditation since I missed that flight. I had remained indoors the whole weekend, refusing to pick phones from people I had blamed for my stupidity. I was blaming some for keeping me late in some Christian functions the night before.

I was blaming others for not waking me up or calling me in the morning. Therefore, come this Monday morning, I was up by 04.30am, had a shave, showered and left the house at exactly 05.15 am. The cab I had booked the evening before was waiting. By 05.35 am, I was already at JKIA Terminal One where I was expected to board the legendary UNCAS aircraft that had left me behind two days before. I had confirmed with my host in Baidoa that they would pick me up. However, on arriving at the check-in counter, I discovered to my consternation that I was not on that morning’s manifest!

It took a couple of calls and nearly one hour of anxiety at that ungodly hour to include me on the list. When I was almost certain I would be on the plane, one other hitch was in the offing! I needed to cough up some $ 20 as airport tax!

I had not paid tax at this airport for the last ten years therefore I didn’t carry Kenyan money nor did I have American green notes! I was told this was UNCAS so I had to find the $20 if I planned to board the aircraft.

Quick thinking told me to go to the visa point and use my card. Pressing a single wrong digit had my card swallowed by the machine! I was properly stranded now. One desperate phone call to a friend 20 km away saved the situation in the nick of time. The rest of the passengers had boarded the aircraft. I was about to be left behind again!

And the ground crew were furious with me with one elderly Harry promising to report me to my employer, whoever they were! Finally I was in the aircraft headed for Baidoa where a meeting with the Prime Minister, the National Assembly Speaker and several Cabinet Ministers of the Transitional Federal Government was already arranged!

I spent the better part of the two hours reading a borrowed East African Standard to catch up with ODM Kenya/ Narc Kenya politics. When I finally landed at K50, my journey quickly took a new twist I wasn’t prepared for. For the next 24 hours I became a guest of two friendly French volunteers, Lionel and Rumano of Action Against Hunger International, who have pitched camp in the desert to help the poorest of the poor in my continent.

I never heard of them before. Like many international NGOs in the Horn of Africa, they have their coordinating office in Nairobi; hence their presence on the same flight with me. After a humble but deliciously served lunch, cooked by a local Somali help, I got to know my new hosts better.

They were French Aid workers in the continent who came to Somalia at the height of draught and devastating famine. They arrived in the desert and built their centre using local materials and called it home. They took me around on foot, a mile’s walk to go and see their project; a rehab health centre for the sick and malnourished Somali children and their mothers, the sick and aging old men.

Within minutes I had sampled their environment. They had power sourced from the sun to supplement their generator. For this reason, they were able to install essentials of modern civilization like a satellite dish, TV, music system, a fridge, radio communication systems, landline telephone lines and internet facilities to boot.

My dwelling place for the night was a grass-thatched, mud-walled cottage powered with electricity and desert lessos for curtains, most of which bore the mark of their origin; Kenyan tie and die and vitenges from the Coast. The ceiling of my cottage had the finishing of United Arab Emirates Grain Products, implying that these aid workers had their supplies of aid grain imported from the deserts of Arabia!

My cottage, like many others was a round grass thatched hut, a reminder of many traditional Luo simbas back home in Kenya. As I walked around the rehab centre talking to young children, taking pictures of these happy souls, our armed guard and a few elders, I kept wondering aloud what it is that inspires foreigners to come and suffer with us in this continent yet we Africans, no matter how stinking rich we are, would never dream of going out of our way to help our poor neighbors.

As I was taken round different wards, the kitchen area, bore holes that they have dug up and a demonstration farm to teach these nomads the importance of farming, I felt touched and humiliated at the same time. Here I was, bumping into a real humanitarian project I had never heard of before, just because I missed a flight to Baidoa! If there are heroes in Africa, these are the real heroes that must put us Africans to shame for eternity because they have access to something many of us who claim to care for Africa will never have; intimate relationship with the poor and their way of life.

For us the elite, all we can do is theorize and write volumes of literature on poverty. These people live it day and night. They are in the thick of it. Talking of this endless Somali internal conflict, my presence in Wajid proved to me beyond reasonable doubt that President Yusuf has a long way to go if he intends to rule Somalia. The mere fact that there was absolute peace in Wajid, K5O, Mogadishu and many other towns controlled by the ICU, yet Baidoa, Yusuf Abdillahi’s seat of power was burning, told you a lot about the effectiveness of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia. May be it is high time the international community paid more attention to the aspirations of the Islamic Courts Union and their counterparts in Somaliland up north.

These are the two break-away groups that have restored meaningful security into their areas of control in the former United Republic of Somalia.

Source: The Sunday Times Newspaper

Home | Contact us | Links | Archives